Who designed this case and for how many years were they sentenced to prison?

gotta pull out the manual to see which one of these is the real power switch cable and which one is the decoy

OK SO it seems that one of them is the real one from the button, but it only goes to the LCD (or, it's supposed to). The other one comes from the LCD and goes to the motherboard.

that's because this system has an LCD display on the front that's not just active when the PC is on: it's also got an IR receiver which is active when the PC is off, so you can use it to turn the PC on.
But to make that work, you wire the power button into the LED

And this slightly terse diagram explains how it works: the black & white power switch goes to the LCD, and the black & red one goes to the motherboard.
it seems like the black & white one is supposed to stay connected, but somehow got unconnected in mine

unfortunately I can't see where the cables go well enough to blindly connect it.. so I'm gonna have to disassemble the front panel to figure out how to wire this up.

Here's the front panel removed

And the back. it's... complicated.

So that visible PCB seems to just be passive. It's just the connectors for the USB/Firewire/Audio

The other PCB is just the encoder for big front dial.

Which means any smarts, which it must have (to be able to decode infrared and power on the PC!), are hidden in here, with the LCD.

A weird thing about this front panel is that it has a USB header cable for the USB ports, and it has a USB cable to plug in the LCD.

it would have been so easy to just have a USB hub here and not need this USB cable routed internally, but that would have cost 5 cents more

Here's the front of the LCD PCB. You can see the IR receiver over there on the left.
Good thing I opened it, because it's dirty.

So here's the reverse! It says it's the LCD HID_OEM_Rev.1.2
LH. IKO.002(RS. AT)001/002
20080607-00552

With some of the cables removed.

So that CN3 there is the power connector I need to use. I should attach the ATX power button to that.
I'm not really sure what that 3-pin connector is.

So there's two chips in it.
The first one says LCDHID 8CY. LC H.002

And the other one is LCDHID AT.LCH .008

The first one is a CY7C63743
That's a Cypress Semiconductor Low-Speed USB & PS/2 Peripheral Controller.

Place your bets as to if this is a Fancy 8051...

So it's an 8-bit CPU, 256 bytes of ram, 8K bytes of EPROM... hmmm.

It's got a 14-bit program counter. Doesn't the PIC series use 14bit program counters?

OK, this is definitely not an 8051.

Wow!

so apparently the name for this series is the Cypress M8.

And the other chip is an Atmel ATMEGA48V.
That's the well-known AVR series of 8-bit microcontrollers.

So this is basically an Arduino. Cool.

Anyway, the final bit for for this board is to pull off some stickers.
We've got two 6-pin connectors. ISP and DebugWIRE.
These are gonna be programming interfaces for the two chips. ISP for the AVR, and DebugWIRE for the M8

Anyway, having taken this all apart, I now know I can safely attach the B&W power switch connector right here. And now it's time to put it back together!

Put it back together, the system powers on... but no LCD? uh oh.

Let's see if the remote works.

Can I power it on from the remote?

Nope.

Ah-ha! The case came with an ATX extender cable. I thought that was because the case is wide, but nope! it also splits off 3 pins... which hook up to that 3-pin connector.
Because it needs power even when the PC is off, right?

And... the LCD backlight just came on. The LCD isn't doing anything, and the system is off, so that's slightly odd.

And the remote can power it on now!

Nothing from the LCD though. Maybe I need to install the drivers to make it work.

I gotta figure out what OS it wants, though. This system is currently running ubuntu and I kinda doubt they included ubuntu drivers

The INF files on the disk mention Windows 98, Windows 2000, and Windows XP.
(with partial experimental support for Windows XP 64bit!)

WINXP IT IS THEN

Actually I'm gonna be lazy and not even INSTALL xp on here.
I've got a useless Mini-ITX box right here with XP on it, and I'm just gonna yank the hard drive out and swap it into this machine.

or not! apparently this XP install reboots the whole machine.
sigh.
guess I'm installing it anyway.

SAVE ME RUFUS

The annoying thing is that this motherboard might simply be incompatible with this case, as stupid as that sounds.

The drivers are win98-XP, but the motherboard might not be able to run an OS that old

ahh, no. The motherboard is out of a Dell Vostro 230, and it says it has an XP Pro option. So it definitely CAN run XP... it just doesn't want to.

god damn it.
I forgot my penis was so slow

I have lots of novelty USB drives. for some reason this one is always easy to find.

but it's deeply shit. I didn't even bother plugging it into a USB3 port because I know for a fact that it's slow and shit.

Finally starting the install process

We've got windows!

well I installed the first of the drivers, in hopes of getting the ethernet working, and... now it's hanging. on BIOS.

the fuck?
that shouldn't be possible... this is a windows driver! I'm not even booting windows!

ahh, no... I think it's the mouse!
I attached a mouse after booting before, and this was the first time I tried to boot with it connected.
I bet it just can't handle the mouse.

it's probably trying to boot off it or something

I've often said before I want a mouse with a USB storage device inside it.

for Evil.

but this isn't one.

YET!
WHERE'S MY SOLDERING IRON!?

dang it. I installed all the drivers and everything works now... except the network

motherfucker

this is Dell's fault!

I go to the support page for this machine. I scroll down to network drivers. I pick the driver. it downloads as Broadcom_57XX-Gigabit-Integr-blahblahblah.exe, I run it, and THIS IS A MOTHERFUCKING AUDIO DRIVER FOR A SOUND CARD THAT ISN'T IN THIS COMPUTER

dell fucked up their driver installers!

anyway, got the second installer from here, which works:
https://www.dell.com/support/home/en-us/drivers/driversdetails?driverid=6r5g6

and now I can install the LCD drivers!

ok, this LCD is two things:
1. really hard to photograph
2. fucking gorgeous

It clearly wants to look like a VFD but it's not. It's an LCD.
But it's a very nice one. Very heavy ghosting (which is why it is so hard to photograph) but it's got a good deal of contrast.

so it has a set of categories for things you can display on it, and in standard auto mode it just switches between them.

so it can do things like pull RSS feeds and tell you when they update, giving you headlines.
It can check your email (if you have pop3), and tell you when you get emails.

and it shows a volume thing when you use the big volume wheel (which also works, hurray!)

The System Information part gives you some standard options but no ability to customize them.
But it's handy if you want to know how much of your RAM if free.

Also: You can change the font. This is very interesting, because all the fonts are very thin 1bit pixel things, but it's loading standard fonts? So like, here's Comic Sans.
That certainly looks... comic sansy, but it's THIN!

So I was thinking that they just had pre-baked some standard fonts into a 1-pixel wide version?

Except if that's the case, WHY IN THE GLORIOUS FUCK DID THEY DO WINGDINGS?

Huh. I installed a new font and it showed up there. So it is a custom renderer!

of course now all my plans to make this thing play Doom are on a back burner.

How can I steal this thing's custom font rendering?

I wonder if it's sending bitmaps over the wire, or if it sends the font to the device and then just sends it text?

nah, it's gotta be bitmaps...

ahahaha
I just had the stupidest idea.

So you know how it has several categories of information display available?

remote control messages, system info, media information, email check, daily news, city information, and graphical equalizer.

what if... I set up an email server?

and just automate sending myself emails at the local pop3 server, which just show all the different letters, and then I have a webcam pointed at the screen to rip the glyphs?

as stupid as that would be, a slightly easier but still stupid way would be to install winamp
and create a bunch of tiny mp3 files with interesting ID3 tags...

anyway now I gotta try the winamp integration. time to whip some llamas' asses!

Dang it, it's not detecting WinAmp.
Maybe it wants an older version? 2.x instead of 5.x?
Or maybe it only detects WinAmp on startup? REBOOTING

No luck on the reboot. I did confirm the boot issue can be removed by switching to a PS/2 mouse, though.

Yep! Switching to 2.666 works fine.
I wasn't able to take a good picture because it NEVER STOPS ANIMATING

there's some interesting commands from SG_VFD.DLL

also, this device is apparently usb vid 15C2 and pid 0038, which seems to be supported by LCDproc, which is open source. maybe I can steal the usb protocol docs from them

yup! https://github.com/lcdproc/lcdproc/blob/master/server/drivers/imonlcd.c

So from reading from there, it sounds like the device is quite stupid. You send some masks to set the little indicators around the edges, and then just a bunch of pixels.

and the screen is 96x16, apparently.

So apparently Soundgraph (who made this LCD) did have some kind of SDK available, but they're long gone and their site was way too javascript for the internet archive to get it

I found a copy of part of it elsewhere and it's frighteningly shit. all you can do is send a "settext" command. Booo
https://sourceforge.net/p/ourorgan/svn/3/tree//trunk/imon/SG_VFD.h

you'd think by now I'd have realized never to trust an official API.
Why ask for permission when you can break in?

it's not even spelled right. the second parameter for iMONVFD_Init is "resevered"

whelp. I installed python and called the imon_vfd functions, and I was able to initialize it, confirm it's inited, then send a message to it to display some text... which didn't work

I was able to successfully call iMONHID_GetAtmegaFwVersion.
It's 0x21FC00

what's that mean? fuck if I know

I found some docs from someone who reversed some of it, which twitter won't let me link:

www.geocities .ws/imonapi/